fidelity to God. I only protest against that selfflattery, which permits our good-nature towards earth to lull to sleep our aspirations to heaven.

Another spurious form of religion is discerned among those who regard it as an indispensable ornament of character; who speak much of the incompleteness of human nature without it; and plead the claims of piety on the ground that it is an offence against mental symmetry to be without it. The most palpable exhibition of this imitation of faith is found among those who, after craniological research, conceive that they have discovered a certain cerebral provision for a god; and who therefore conclude that the culture of devotion is necessary to physiological consistency. They speak at large of man's need of a religion, of his unsatisfied wants without it; of the grace which it adds to his moral stature, the dignity it gives to his affections, the power which it administers to his will: and then they issue orders to their ingenuity to devise a religion suitable to this discovered want, precisely adapted to the cravings of this appetite. Alas! however, this is not the way in which a religion can be found: it cannot thus by any skill be carved and constructed according to measurements taken on purpose from our nature. It is easy indeed to imagine and invent a faith, seemingly just fitted to our wants; but

then comes the question, how are we to get it believed. And here, it is to be feared, is the failure of this school: they seem to have more faith in the religiousness of man, than in the reality of God. The same danger attends the idea, wherever found, of aiming constantly at our own self-perfection, and, under the influence of this aim, striving to put the last and saintly finish of a pure devotion to our character. Surely there is something unsound and morbid in thus resolving the whole idea of obligation and truth into that of beauty. As long as we are but painting our own ideal portrait, we can produce no living and substantial goodness, but a mere canvass thing of surface dimension only. Human character and life are something more than mere matters of taste and propriety; and will attain to nothing excellent till they are regarded in the spirit of an earnest reality. Devotion can find no firm foundation in the notion of its relative fitness to us, but must feel its foot on the absolute truth of its glorious and sublime objects. All else is abhorrent from the pure simplicity of faith, and tends only to foster an indifference to truth, and an affectation of religion. God, refusing to be discerned through the impure eye of expediency, reveals himself only to our inward intuitions of conscience. The piety that loves him will recognise no third thing be

tween yea and no. To assume his reality, because the hypothesis seems to open the best training school for our human nature; to treat the highest of all things as true, only because we want it to be true, and shall be the better for it if it is,-what is this but, under decent disguise, the French philo: sopher's characteristic exclamation, 'If there were not a God, we should have to invent one.' To an earnest mind this air of protection and appropriation towards things divine and holy is unspeakably offensive. It is for God to rule and guard our conscience, not for our conscience to take care of God. And to every pure submissive mind his voice within is heard rebuking this presumptuous spirit, and repeating the words of Christ, 'Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you.'

VIII.

MAMMON-WORSHIP.

MATTHEW VI. 28.

CONSIDER THE LILIES OF THE FIELD, HOW THEY GROW; THEY TOIL NOT, NEITHER DO THEY SPIN; AND YET I SAY UNTO YOU, THAT SOLOMON, IN ALL HIS GLORY, WAS NOT ARRAYED LIKE ONE OF THESE.

In no time or country has Christianity ever been exhibited in its simple integrity. The soul of its author was the only pure and perfect expression of its spirit; it was at once the creator and the sole director of his mind ;-born within that palace to be its Lord. In every other instance Christianity has been only one out of many influences concerned in forming the character of its professors; and they have given it various shapes, according to the climate, the society, the occupations in which they have lived. The prejudices and passions of every community, - the inevitable growth of its position, have weakened its religion and morality in some points, and strengthened